2001 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers Ceremony

This is a great time to be embarking on a career in science or engineering. And it's an important time.

It's a great time, because steady advances in the tools available for technical work have recently crossed a threshold of capability that open entirely new frontiers for scientific discovery, and provide unprecedented power for the analysis and solution of real-life problems.

The most impressive of these tools, and the one having the greatest impact on how we do technical work today, is computing and its associated technologies. Information technology is not only making it possible for us to simulate and visualize complex systems atom-by-atom. It is also bringing the technical community closer together.

Today's project teams operate in a mode that transcends the limitations of time and space that have been major obstacles to scientific progress in the past. As I began my own science career, international collaboration required taking a sabbatical to work abroad, or corresponding by mail to link teams that were working in a nearly independent mode. That has changed dramatically during the past decade. Science collaboration is now truly global, and some kinds of work can be passed from team to team in real time around the world, shortening the time required to link experimental data with scientific significance, or to bridge the gap between ideas and products.

Rapid and pervasive communication makes new kinds of science possible. The idea of "open source software" is actually a paradigm that extends far beyond software. Today no science project need be isolated from potential collaborators anywhere. Networks can form spontaneously to address problems such as data collection on species, climate, or human behavior. Anyone can establish a data base and a protocol for adding to it, and invite others to contribute. And databases of manuscripts, translations, historical collections, images, and technical references are increasing the power of individual investigators and innovators exponentially. The very nature of technical work has changed in a revolutionary way during the past ten years.

Computing and communications are the only tools of science that encompass literally every field. That is one reason why it is one of only a handful of cross-cutting priorities identified for sustained support by this administration. But information technology by itself does not suffice. Equally important are the tools we use to gather the data and implement its consequences -- the instrumentation and facilities that support all science and engineering work. Here too the past few decades have seen an extraordinary increase in capabilities. My favorite examples of powerful instrumentation are the synchrotron light sources and neutron sources we use to determine the atomic structures of complex materials, from proteins to buckeyballs.

This new instrumentation is bringing about a merging of the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology, and what has been described as a convergence of the technologies at the interfaces among these traditional disciplines: biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology. Entirely new technologies will spring from this convergence, and you and your colleagues will bring them into existence.

These twin capabilities of powerful computing and powerful instrumentation open up entirely new areas of science at what I call the frontier of complexity. The opportunities have expanded suddenly in materials science, life science, and all the applied sciences. But they have also expanded at the traditional frontiers of the very large and the very small. The phenomena we are now probing with the great telescopes and the great particle accelerators depend on collecting vast amounts of data with sophisticated detectors, and analyzing it in ways that just a few years ago would have been impossibly time consuming.

Truly these are exciting times for discovery and for invention. But they are important times as well for scientists and engineers.

The very technologies that promise to improve the quality of life for populations around the globe also magnify the opportunities for widespread disruptions by terrorists or by natural disasters. September 11 taught us many important lessons, not the least of which is the technical nature of our systems of everyday life, and the technical quality of the means we must employ to protect them.

We rely on technology for transportation, communication, energy production and distribution, food supply, health care, and entertainment. In each area, complex and interconnected systems have grown up with little thought to protecting them against deliberate disruption. The widespread incidence of hacking, mostly by amateurs, but increasingly by people from around the world, is a signal and a warning to us. We need to pay attention to our inadvertent weaknesses, and build a culture of vigilance to prevent mischief from developing into tragedy.

In all our future thinking about ways to improve our quality of life, our economic competitiveness, or our treatment of the environment, we need to include a new dimension -- a dimension of self-protection -- literally of homeland security. We need to build in robustness and anti-terrorist measures into our products and our behaviors as technical professionals.

I congratulate you today on your accomplishments, on the promise they hold for the future, and on the impact they will have on your colleagues and especially on those who come after you.